Dark And Woodchucks

710 Words3 Pages
“Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford and “Woodchucks” by Maxine Kumin utilize various aspects of language to convey their speakers’ contrasting emotions and relationships towards the animals in the respective works. Both authors use diction, imagery, and figurative language to paint the scenes of their poems. Stafford’s work uses dark and simple word choice to present the speaker’s situation to the reader. The speaker does not really commit to strong definitive words. For example, in line eight, the speaker merely says that “...she was large in the belly” as opposed to coming outright and saying that the doe was pregnant. This was probably an attempt to remain emotionally indifferent towards the whole ordeal. The driver makes…show more content…
Kumin’s speaker goes out of her way to describe how the woodchucks looked in the duration of her rampage. the gardener starts out with “He died down in the everbearing roses.” (Line 17), but her descriptions quickly escalate to “...I dropped the mother. She flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard. Another baby next.” (Lines 18-23). Kumin’s speaker obviously felt driven to the lengths she went in order to eliminate pests. The imagery goes from casual to revelry in only a few lines. The speaker went so far as to mention what the woodchuck was holding the moment it died, giving the reader a clearer, more detailed picture of the scene. Stafford’s driver describes the scene by saying “I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red…” making it easy or the reader to imagine how this dark empty road with the speaker and the doe looked. It also gives the reader a sense of foreboding as to what decision the speaker was going to make. It still seems as if the driver in Stafford’s poem is indifferent to the doe and only has everyone’s best interests in mind. Both poems showed the speakers’ dynamic relationships with the animals through this
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